Statistical theory

The theory of statistics provides a basis for the whole range of techniques, in both study design and data analysis, that are used within applications of statistics.[1][2] The theory covers approaches to statistical-decision problems and to statistical inference, and the actions and deductions that satisfy the basic principles stated for these different approaches. Within a given approach, statistical theory gives ways of comparing statistical procedures; it can find a best possible procedure within a given context for given statistical problems, or can provide guidance on the choice between alternative procedures.[2][3]

Statistical models, once specified, can be tested to see whether they provide useful inferences for new data sets.[4] Testing a hypothesis using the data that was used to specify the model is a fallacy, according to the natural science of Bacon and the scientific method of Peirce.[citation needed]

Statistical theory provides a guide to comparing methods of data collection, where the problem is to generate informative data using optimization and randomization while measuring and controlling for observational error.[5][6][7] Optimization of data collection reduces the cost of data while satisfying statistical goals,[8][9] while randomization allows reliable inferences. Statistical theory provides a basis for good data collection and the structuring of investigations in the topics of:

The task of summarising statistical data in conventional forms (also known as descriptive statistics) is considered in theoretical statistics as a problem of defining what aspects of statistical samples need to be described and how well they can be described from a typically limited sample of data. Thus the problems theoretical statistics considers include:

Besides the philosophy underlying statistical inference, statistical theory has the task of considering the types of questions that data analysts might want to ask about the problems they are studying and of providing data analytic techniques for answering them. Some of these tasks are:

Providing ways of predicting the outcome of a random quantity given other related variables

Examining the possibility of reducing the number of variables being considered within a problem (the task of Dimension reduction)

When a statistical procedure has been specified in the study protocol, then statistical theory provides well-defined probability statements for the method when applied to all populations that could have arisen from the randomization used to generate the data. This provides an objective way of estimating parameters, estimating confidence intervals, testing hypotheses, and selecting the best. Even for observational data, statistical theory provides a way of calculating a value that can be used to interpret a sample of data from a population, it can provide a means of indicating how well that value is determined by the sample, and thus a means of saying corresponding values derived for different populations are as different as they might seem; however, the reliability of inferences from post-hoc observational data is often worse than for planned randomized generation of data.

Many of the standard methods for those approaches rely on certain statistical assumptions (made in the derivation of the methodology) actually holding in practice. Statistical theory studies the consequences of departures from these assumptions. In addition it provides a range of robust statistical techniques that are less dependent on assumptions, and it provides methods checking whether particular assumptions are reasonable for a given data set.